Smart Call Center Outsourcing, OpenERP, OnApp Interview, Racemi's Guillory

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Smart Call Center Outsourcing, OpenERP, OnApp Interview, Racemi's Guillory

 

What would intelligent Web engagement look like? Good question, isn’t it?

Sitel, a call center outsourcing provider recently produced a paper on just that topic, titled “Sitel Intelligent Web Engagement: A Social Engagement Model for Incremental Return on Customer Investment.”


Basically if you’re using social media to either attract or interact with you customers, you need to read this white paper. And if you’re not, well, you probably need to read it even more.

As the paper correctly notes, the cyber customer is “a sophisticated and informed buyer, influencer and potential advocate for your brand.”

That means the service and support you offer needs to capture the customer’s interest and engage them at the most appropriate times, the paper says: “Proactive engagement is today’s social method for business to enable its customers, while increasing customer wallet share.” In particular—this means chat and emerging social networking channels.

The paper highlights a few main areas of discussion.

Read more here.

At the recent Cloud Expo 2011 in New York City, TMC’s CEO Rich Tehrani sat down and spoke with OpenERP’s business development director for the Americas, Fabrice Henrion.

As TMC’s Paula Bernier wrote recently, OpenERP is a five-year-old company selling ERP applications, open source and software as a service. It generally caters to small and medium businesses and has more than 500 customers ­– and OpenERP’s software sees more than 1,000 downloads daily.

OpenERP officials say companies are starting to look for ERP suites to replace Quickbooks and other home-grown products, but they don’t have the resources to go with something from Oracle or SAP. That’s where OpenERP comes in.

The company sells a range of business apps, not just ERP, but CRM, inventory control, HR, manufacturing and distribution, warehouse management. As Henrion said, SMBs generally don’t have the right products and apps they need. The goal of OpenERP is to give affordable tools to businesses.

Read more here.

At the recent Cloud Expo 2011 in New York City, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Ditlev Bredahl, the CEO of OnApp.

OnApp makes a cloud platform intended to provide a way for a web host to set up, configure and manage a cloud hosting operation, without requiring a lot of specialized equipment, just an off-the-shelf server and storage hardware. Then once the cloud is deployed, OnApp gives the user such web-based functions as control of clouds, virtual machines, storage and compute resources, users, billing and more.

Bredahl noted that time to market is a big concern of many of their clients. “We had one guy who wasn’t happy with one of our competitors, and we migrated his whole setup in 12 hours – billing, everything,” he noted. Admittedly that would be fast, a normal migration is about 24 to 48 hours.

It’s not exactly an untapped market, but it’s one where OnApp knows its focus. As Bredahl says “there are around 33,000 hosting companies in the world” who deal with more than a thousand domains, have over five employees and have a million dollars in revenue. And of those, only 500 have a cloud offering, and “we power 278 of those 500,” he said.

As Bredahl noted, cloud hosting is one of those things that “everybody’s talking about, but not that many are actually doing.”

Read more here.

At the recent Cloud Expo 2011 in New York City, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani conducted an interview with Racemi’s CEO, Lawrence Guillory.

The company builds software that plugs into other products, for capturing server images and migrating them in and out of the cloud.

“For example,” he said, “you can capture an entire server, the applications, the device and server configurations, the operating system, the entire stack, the resident data there, and move it into any physical, virtual or cloud environment.”

Basically, as Tehrani said, it’s a way to immediately virtualize physical servers. The product is agnostic whether the server is physical, virtual or cloud, “it’s more about the migration capability,” Guillory said.

It’s a good service if, for example, you want to do something like move from an HP server to a Dell server – or from a Dell server to an HP server, makes no difference. Guillory explained the importance of it, saying, correctly, “If you’re going to do cloud computing, you’ve got to have data center automation. And if you’re going to do data center automation, you need the ability to work in a heterogenous environment.”

Read more here.



 



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